Classically, teachers and students alike tend to view
questions as stemming from problems; if nothing bothers you, you don't ask. Even
progressive methods devised to make students active learners through
questioning seem to view questions as stemming from problems. For example, the
"inquiry training" model relies on presenting students with puzzling
events that will naturally arouse their curiosity and stimulate their
questions. This approach "deliberately selects episodes that have
sufficiently surprising outcomes to make it difficult for students to remain
indifferent to the encounter.

Perhaps you've seen a science exhibition where they put a
blown up balloon into liquid nitrogen, and it comes out shrunk. The kids are
naturally stimulated to ask why it does that, because the outcome is
surprising. This is precisely the kind of curiosity-generating activity that
would kick off a unit in the inquiry training approach.

But let's consider another way to stimulate curiosity. Take a
regular balloon, a normal object that doesn't automatically generate questions,
and hold it up in front of a classroom as is, and tell students they have two minutes
to write down as many questions as they can think of that will help them
understand the balloon better. Tell them not to hold back, but to let their
imaginations go.

When I do this experiment on myself, I find that I suddenly
become interested in things I wasn't interested in before – science questions
such as why balloons lose their air after a while, manufacturing questions like
how balloons are made, or maybe economic questions like how do they decide how
much balloons cost. When one is prompted in this manner, instead of curiosity
generating questions, it is the discipline of questioning that generates the
curiosity. We might refer to this latter kind of question as a
research-oriented question, as opposed to a problem-based question, because asking
this kind of question is often the key to researching a topic

My guess is that most students only know about problem-based
questions and are never taught to ask research-oriented questions. Neil Postman
expressed his “astonishment at the neglect shown in school toward” the art of
formulating questions. “All our knowledge results from questions, which is
another way of saying that question asking is our most important intellectual
tool. I would go so far as to say that the answers we carry about in our heads
are largely meaningless unless we know the questions which produced them.”